The apostle now anticipates a question that
will inevitably arise: What is the relationship of the Christian to the law?
Perhaps Paul had Jewish believers especially in mind in answering this
question, since the law was given to Israel, but the principles apply just as
much to Gentile believers who foolishly want to put themselves under the law as
a rule of life after they have been justified.

In chapter 6 we saw that death ended the tyranny of the sin nature in the life
of the child of God. Now we will see that death likewise ends the dominion of
the law over those who were under it.

7:1 This verse is connected with 6:14: “You are not under law but under grace.” The connection is, “You
should know that you are not under law—or are you ignorant of the fact that
the law has dominion over a man only when he is alive?” Paul is
speaking to those who are familiar with fundamental principles of law, and who
therefore should know that the law has nothing to say to a dead man.

7:2 To illustrate this, Paul shows how death breaks the marriage
contract. A woman is bound by the marriage law to her husband
as long as he lives. But if he dies, she is released from that law.

7:3 If a woman marries another man
while her husband is living, she is guilty of adultery. If, however,
her husband dies, she is free to marry again without any cloud or guilt
of wrongdoing.

7:4 In applying the illustration, we must not press each detail with
exact literalness. For example, neither the husband nor the wife
represents the law. The point of the illustration is that just as death breaks
the marriage relationship, so the death of the believer with Christ breaks the
jurisdiction of the law over him.

Notice that Paul does not say that
the law is dead. The law still has a valid ministry in producing conviction of
sin. And remember that when he says “we” in this passage, he is thinking of
those who were Jews before they came to Christ.

We have been made dead to the law through
the body of Christ, the body here referring to the giving up of His body
in death. We are no longer joined to the law; we are now joined to the
risen Christ. One marriage has been broken by death, and a new one has been
formed. And now that we are free from the law, we can bear
fruit to God.

7:5 This mention of fruit brings to mind the kind of fruit we
bore when we were in the flesh. The expression in the flesh
obviously doesn’t mean “in the body.” In the flesh here is descriptive
of our standing before we were saved. Then the flesh was the basis of our
standing before God. We depended on what we were or what we could do to win
acceptance with God. In the flesh is the opposite of “in Christ.”

Prior to our conversion we were ruled by sinful
passions which were aroused by the law. It is not that the law originated
them, but only that by naming and then forbidding them it stirred up the strong
desire to do them!

These sinful passions found
expression in our physical members, and when we yielded to temptation we
produced poison fruit that results in death. Elsewhere the apostle
speaks of this fruit as the works of the flesh: “adultery, fornication,
uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies,
outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders,
drunkenness, revelries” (Gal. 5:19-21).

7:6 Among the many wonderful things that happen when we are converted
is that we are delivered from the law. This is a result of our having
died with Christ. Since He died as our Representative, we died with Him.
In His death He fulfilled all the claims of the law by paying its awful
penalty. Therefore we are free from the law and from its inevitable curse.
There can be no double jeopardy.

Payment God will not twice demand—

First at my bleeding Surety’s hand

And then again at mine.

— Augustus M. Toplady

We are now set free to serve in the
newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter. Our service is
motivated by love, not fear; it is a service of freedom, not bondage. It is no
longer a question of slavishly adhering to minute details of forms and
ceremonies but of the joyful outpouring of ourselves for the glory of God and
the blessing of others.

7:7 It might seem from all this that Paul is critical of the
law. He had said that believers are dead to sin and dead to the law, and this
might have created the impression that the law is evil. But this is far from
the case.

In 7:7-13 he goes on to describe the important role which the law played in
his own life before he was saved. He emphasizes that the law itself is not
sinful, but that it reveals sin in man. It was the law that convicted
him of the terrible depravity of his heart. As long as he compared himself with
other people, he felt fairly respectable. But as soon as the demands of God’s
law came home to him in convicting power, he stood speechless and condemned.

The one particular commandment that revealed
sin to him was the tenth: You shall not covet. Coveting takes place in
the mind. Although Paul may not have committed any of the grosser, more
revolting sins, he now realized that his thought life was corrupt. He
understood that evil thoughts are sinful as well as evil deeds. He had a
polluted thought life. His outward life may have been relatively blameless, but
his inward life was a chamber of horrors.

7:8 Sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all
manner of evil desire. Evil desire here means
coveting. When the law forbids all kinds of evil coveting, man’s corrupt nature
is inflamed all the more to do it. For example, the law says, in effect, “You
must not conjure up all sorts of pleasurable sexual encounters in your mind.
You must not live in a world of lustful fantasies.” The law forbids a dirty,
vile, suggestive thought-life. But unfortunately it doesn’t give the power to
overcome. So the result is that people under law become more involved in a
dream-world of sexual uncleanness than ever before. They come to realize that
whenever an act is forbidden, the fallen nature wants to do it all the more.
“Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant” (Prov. 9:17).

Apart from the law sin is dead, relatively speaking. The sinful nature is like a
sleeping dog. When the law comes and says “Don’t,” the dog wakes up and goes on
a rampage, doing excessively whatever is forbidden.

7:9 Before being convicted by the law Paul was alive; that is,
his sinful nature was comparatively dormant and he was blissfully
ignorant of the pit of iniquity in his heart.

But when the commandment came — that is, when it came with crushing conviction—his sinful nature
became thoroughly inflamed. The more he tried to obey, the worse he failed. He died
as far as any hope of achieving salvation by his own character or efforts was
concerned. He died to any thought of his own inherent goodness. He died
to any dream of being justified by law-keeping.

7:10 He found that the commandment, which was to bring life
actually turned out to bring death for him. But what does he mean that
the commandment was to bring life? This probably looks back to Leviticus 18:5, where God said, “You shall
therefore keep My statutes and My judgments, which if a man does, he shall live
by them: I am the Lord.” Ideally the law promised life to those
who kept it. The sign outside a lion’s cage says, “Stay back of the railing.”
If obeyed, the commandment brings life. But for the child who disobeys and
reaches in to pet the lion, it brings death.

7:11 Again Paul emphasizes that the law was not to blame. It was
indwelling sin that incited him to do what the law prohibited. Sin
tricked him into thinking that the forbidden fruit wasn’t so bad after all,
that it would bring happiness, and that he could get away with it. It suggested
that God was withholding pleasures from him that were for his good. Thus sin killed
him in the sense that it spelled death to his best hopes of deserving or earning
salvation.

7:12The law itself is holy, and each commandment is
holy and just and good. In our thinking we must constantly remember that
there is nothing wrong with the law. It was given by God and therefore is
perfect as an expression of His will for His people. The weakness of the law
lay in the “raw materials” it had to work with: it was given to people who were
already sinners. They needed the law to give them the knowledge of sin, but
beyond that they needed a Savior to deliver them from the penalty and power of
sin.

7:13What is good refers to the law, as is specifically stated
in the preceding verse. Paul raises the question “Did the law become death
to me?” which means “Is the law the culprit, dooming Paul (and all the rest
of us) to death?” The answer, of course, is “Certainly not!”Sin
is the culprit. The law didn’t originate sin, but it showed sin in all its
exceeding sinfulness. “By the law is the knowledge of sin” (3:20b). But that is not all! How does man’s
sinful nature respond when God’s holy law forbids it to do something? The
answer is well-known. What may have been dormant desire now becomes a burning
passion! Thus sin through the commandment becomes exceedingly sinful.

There might seem to be a contradiction
between what Paul says here and in 7:10. There he said he found the law to bring death. Here he denies
that the law became death to him. The solution is this: The law by itself can
neither improve the old nature on the one hand nor cause it to sin on the
other. It can reveal sin, just as a thermometer reveals the temperature. But it
cannot control sin like a thermostat controls the temperature.

But what happens is this. Man’s fallen human
nature instinctively wants to do whatever is forbidden. So it uses the law to
awaken otherwise-dormant lusts in the sinner’s life. The more man tries, the
worse it gets, till at last he is brought to despair of all hope. Thus sin uses
the law to cause any hope of improvement to die in him. And he sees the
exceeding sinfulness of his old nature as he never saw it before.

7:14 Up to this point the apostle has been describing a past
experience in his life—namely, the traumatic crisis when he underwent deep
conviction of sin through the law’s ministry.

Now he changes to the present tense to
describe an experience he had since he was born again—namely, the conflict
between the two natures and the impossibility of finding deliverance from the
power of indwelling sin through his own strength. Paul acknowledges that the
law is spiritual—that is, holy in itself and adapted to man’s spiritual
benefit. But he realizes that he is carnal because he is not
experiencing victory over the power of indwelling sin in his life. He is sold
under sin. He feels as if he is sold as a slave with sin as his master.

7:15 Now the apostle describes the struggle that goes on in a believer
who does not know the truth of his identification with Christ in death and
resurrection. It is the conflict between the two natures in the person who
climbs Mount Sinai in search of holiness. Harry Foster explains:

Here was a man trying to achieve
holiness by personal effort, struggling with all his might to fulfill God’s
“holy and righteous and good” commandments (v.12), only to discover that the more he struggled, the worse his
condition became. It was a losing battle, and no wonder, for it is not in the
power of fallen human nature to conquer sin and live in holiness. 25

Notice the prominence of the first-person
pronouns—I, me, my, myself; they occur over forty times in verses 9-25! People who go through this Romans 7 experience have taken an
overdose of “Vitamin I.” They are introspective to the core, searching for
victory in self, where it cannot be found.

Sadly, most modern Christian psychological
counseling focuses the coun selee’s attention on himself and thus adds to the
problem instead of relieving it. People need to know that they have died with
Christ and have risen with Him to walk in newness of life. Then, instead of
trying to improve the flesh, they will relegate it to the grave of Jesus.

In describing the struggle between the two
natures, Paul says, what I am doing, I do not understand. He is a split
personality, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He finds himself indulging in things
that he doesn’t want to do, and practicing things that he hates.

7:16 In thus committing acts which his better judgment condemns, he is
taking sides with the law against himself, because the law condemns them
too. So he gives inward assent that the law is good.

7:17 This leads to the conclusion that the culprit is not the new man
in Christ, but the sinful, corrupt nature that dwells in him. But we must be
careful here. We must not excuse our sinning by passing it off to indwelling sin.
We are responsible for what we do, and we must not use this verse to
“pass the buck.” All Paul is doing here is tracking down the source of his
sinful behavior, not excusing it.

7:18 There can be no progress in holiness until we learn what Paul
learned here—that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells. The flesh
here means the evil, corrupt nature which is inherited from Adam and which is
still in every believer. It is the source of every evil action which a person
performs. There is nothing good in it.

When we learn this, it delivers us from ever
looking for any good in the old nature. It delivers us from being disappointed
when we don’t find any good there. And it delivers us from occupation with
ourselves. There is no victory in introspection. As the saintly Scot, Robert
Murray McCheyne said, for every look we take at ourselves, we should take ten
looks at Christ.

To confirm the hopelessness of the flesh,
the apostle mourns that although he has the desire to do what is right, he
doesn’t have the resources in himself to translate his desire into action. The
trouble, of course, is that he is casting his anchor inside the boat.

7:19 Thus the conflict between the two natures rages on. He finds
himself failing to do the good he wants to do, and instead doing the
evil that he despises. He is just one great mass of contradictions and
paradoxes.

7:20 We might paraphrase this verse as follows: “Now if I (the
old nature) do what I (the new nature) don’t want to do, it is no
longer I (the person) who do it, but sin that dwells within me.”
Again let it be clear that Paul is not excusing himself or disclaiming
responsibility. He is simply stating that he has not found deliverance from the
power of indwelling sin, and that when he sins, it is not with the desire of
the new man.

7:21 He finds a principle or law at work in his life causing
all his good intentions to end in failure. When he wants to do what is right,
he ends up by sinning.

7:22 As far as his new nature is concerned, he delights in the law
of God. He knows that the law is holy, and that it is an expression of the
will of God. He wants to do God’s will.

7:23 But he sees a contrary principle at work in his life, striving
against the new nature, and making him a captive of indwelling sin.
George Cutting writes:

The law, though he delights in
it after the inward man, gives him no power. In other words, he is trying to
accomplish what God has declared to be an utter impossibility—namely, making
the flesh subject to God’s holy law. He finds that the flesh minds the things
of the flesh, and is very enmity itself to the law of God, and even to God
Himself. 26

7:24 Now Paul lets out his famous, eloquent groan. He feels as if he
has a decomposing body strapped to his back. That body, of course, is
the old nature in all its corruption. In his wretchedness he acknowledges that
he is unable to deliver himself from this offensive, repulsive bondage. He must
have help from some outside source.

7:25 The burst of thanksgiving which opens this verse may be
understood in at least two ways. It may mean “I thank God that
deliverance comes through Jesus Christ our Lord” or it may be an aside
in which Paul thanks God through the Lord Jesus that he is no
longer the wretched man of the preceding verse.

The rest of the verse summarizes the
conflict between the two natures before deliverance is realized. With the
renewed mind, or the new nature, the believer serves the law of God,
but with the flesh or (old nature) the law of sin. Not till we reach
the next chapter do we find the way of deliverance explained.

Footnotes

25 (7:15) Harry
Foster, article in Toward the Mark, p. 110.

26 (7:23) George
Cutting, “The Old Nature and the New Birth” (booklet), p. 33.